'The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation'
Bertrand Russell
Related Projects
The dynamics of collective action and women’s agency: A study of coffee farmers’ cooperative in Western Uganda’s highlands
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Start project |
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2012-01-28 |
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End Project |
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Ongoing |
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Main topic |
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Cooperatives |
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Description |
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Though historically cooperatives in Africa have their origins in foreign models that were largely designed to achieve colonial extraction motives, during the past two decades cooperatives have become one of the omnipresent forms of economic and social organisation for poverty alleviation in many African countries.
However, the impact of cooperation on the household level, where the driving forces behind change materialize largely, remains terra incognita. As many of these group-based programs target women, an important research question is whether program participation has a significant effect on female agency over time. In other words, how does socio-economic empowerment through collective and group dynamics engender new behavior (e.g. later and ‘love’ marriage) and subsequently influence women's agency on the household level where the driving forces behind change materialize? Can we observe systematic differences in female empowerment between participants that have been members for a longer period than others?
More in particular, the focus is on gender-related issues such as fertility, domestic violence, spousal age gaps, income pooling, and investment into human capital of children. The study aims at investigating the above mentioned variables among a female-dominated, 3,800 member bottom-up, microfinance, and coffee marketing cooperative in Western Uganda’s Rwenzori Mountains. Finally, material on the Ugandan cooperative movement between 1930-1980 are documented in the former colonial Toro District Archive which allows to explore the development of the latter and predict the survival chances of cooperatives today on the basis of what we know back in the past. |
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Activities |
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Participants |
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Funding body |
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Co-ordinator |
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Felix Meier zu Selhausen MSc |
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Contact details |
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Felix Meier zu Selhausen Mountains of the Moon University Department of Banking and Microfinance P.O. Box 837 Fort Portal, Uganda E-Mail: felix.meierzuselhausen@gmail.com |
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Links to project |
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> Case study on the Bukonzo Joint Cooperative Microfinance Society Ltd. |
